In this essay, I shall concentrate on an examination of the neo element of neomedievalism, not to the exclusion of medievalism, but in acknowledgement of the many contributions that have already been made to defining and exploring this concept in the past fifty years or so – many of them in the pages of Studies in Medievalism. Whether one or many, medievalisms manifest themselves in one of two ways. First, there is the presentation and re-presentation of (essentially, the European) Middle Ages in art, literary text, and on screen, in order to deliver what Anthony Mann, one of the most gifted and effective auteurs of the historical epic film, termed “the feel of history.” This is the “nominative” meaning of medievalism, in that it centers on the production, or reproduction, of some kind of object, whether book, picture, film, television program, video game, or some other resource in any available medium. In its other form, medievalism describes the intellectual process of examining the way in which both producers (in the general not the cinematic or commercial sense, although they may be this as well) and audiences, or “readers,” of medievalist objects construct their meanings. In other words, medievalism also functions as an examination of the epistemology by which the “medieval” is presented, re-presented, received, and understood. In this sense, medievalism is a branch of historiography. In both of these manifestations, neomedievalism may be said to be a part of medievalism (maybe one of Tom Shippey’s “many medievalisms”), in that it does precisely this – in the same way that “postmodern medievalism” can also be identified as a form of medievalism. On the other hand, I shall argue that neomedievalism, by its nature, cannot be fully contained within “medievalism,” or any other, similar, terminology, as it seeks always to escape from the parameters that “-isms” impose.

Theories of representation, in particular the ideas of Jean Baudrillard, developed from the deconstruction theories of Roland Barthes, form the basis of much contemporary media and cultural theory. Applying Barthes’ theories of deferral in a cultural context, Baudrillard maintained that “reality” is actually a representation, or a series of representations, of that which already claims to be a cultural representation of the “real.”